JAMES PATTERSON’S latest novel, Beach Road, takes as its backdrop the murders of three young men on Long Island in the summer of 2003 and the subsequent trial. Central to the story is a lawyer who represents one of the defendants on a capital charge. The novel has a rich characterisation often absent in legal potboilers — for instance, the lawyer is not a star, he is average. “This inexperienced lawyer with mediocre credentials and crap grades can handle himself in a courtroom.” Anyone who likes to relax with a Grisham novel will enjoy this superior story.

Three murders are also the subject of Andrew Pepper’s The Last Days of Newgate, the first in a series of novels about Pyke, a Bow Street Runner, who finds himself an inmate in the Newgate prison. “The grim irony of the gaoler being sentenced to death” does not escape Pyke, who fights to clear his name and expose the real killer. The novel drips with all the atmospheric detail of a pre-Victorian murder mystery — “pea-soupers”, dingy lanterns and laudanum.

The third novel, The Poe Shadow is also set in the 19th century. Matthew Pearl’s book concerns a Baltimore lawyer, Quentin Clark, who undertakes a mission to salvage the reputation of the celebrated writer Edgar Allan Poe and solve the mystery of his murder. This is a highly literate piece that eloquently considers how Poe, found dead in “ragged, soiled clothes never meant to fit him”, became the victim of one of “the longest murders in history” having been kidnapped and drugged. During Clark’s intriguing fiction, the lawyer suffers “public denunciation” and becomes a murder suspect, as this complex plot weaves between political intrigue, disputed identity and courtroom drama.

Real-life courtroom drama plays a part in Ruth Scurr’s Fatal Purity, her book on Robespierre and the French Revolution. Robespierre was 36 when executed. He started life as a lawyer but soon held the law in disdain, exchanging it for “the justice of the people: swift, inexorable, revolutionary”. He observed that “any revolution must be a transitional period of struggle on the part of an entire people desiring liberty, but as yet unsupported by just laws”. Robespierre is presented as an ultimately tragic figure. There is an inevitability about his fate, an idealist, broken on the guillotine.

Geoff Mulgan’s Good and Bad Power also takes a view of the French Revolution, observing that when it introduced freedom of speech, “the result was not an outbreak of sober judgment but . . . a wave of polemical incontinence that drove the country . . . to the Terror”. Mulgan’s thesis is that governments throughout history have failed in their “responsibility to serve the people” and require vigilant attention if they are to retain their mortality. He argues that such moral dilemmas of state power “often came to a head over the age-old questions of loyalty, and it is here that state morality and personal morality are most likely to clash”. This provocative book reasons that at the core of power is “the ability of leaders to convince others to obey”.

Finally, Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World is also a TV series. He argues that it is not class but race that dominated the 20th century. The work, which begins with the conflicts of the First World War and concludes with the war trials of latter years, presents an idiosyncratic interpretation of history.

Beach Road by James Patterson, Headline £17.99; The Last Days of Newgate by Andrew Pepper, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99; The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl, Harvill Secker £12.99; Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr, Chatto & Windus £20; Good and Bad Power by Geoff Mulgan, Penguin £20; The War of the World by Niall Ferguson, Penguin £25